After studying Social-and Cultural Anthropology and Philosophy in Mainz and Bayreuth, I am now working on my PhD in Cologne as part of the CRC 228 “Future Rural Africa: Future-making and social- ecological transformation”. I am foremost interested in the manifoldness of everyday life and in anthropological key questions about what it means to be alive and in which ways we as (human) beings can and do exist in the world. Since my time in Bayreuth I deal with the topic of nature- conservation on the African continent from a perspective which is nurtured by the absurdities surrounding the objects of nature-conservation. For some ‘wild’ animals and ‘scenic’ landscapes represent remnants of a seemingly glorious ‘pre-modern’ past characterized by a state of equilibrium. In this imagination human beings are conceived of as ontologically different from their non-human environment and therefore potentially disturbing ‘nature’. Consequently, conserving ‘nature’ is sometimes equated with excluding humans from particular places. However, people living in some of these places consider it their ancestral land where they have a right to belong. Further, especially for people who are predominantly farmers and pastoralists, these landscapes are the foundation for their livelihoods and ‘wild’ animals can be a potential threat to their basic means of existence.

I very much appreciate the opportunity to work in an environment such as the GGSC, where one can exchange thoughts, problems and research-experiences with other international junior researchers. Further, workshops and lectures facilitated by the GSSC support the practice of a non-solipsistic academia and enable participation in scientific communities.

In my current research I seek to explore different temporalities at play in a communally managed nature-conservation side in Namibia (CBNRM). There, subsistence farming, fishing and pastoralism as livelihood practices must be ‘synchronized’ with other efforts of increasing or at least maintaining the number of wildlife serving to promote the place as a touristic destiny for ‘nature’-seekers such as rich hunters from the Global North. Subsistence farming, pastoralism, fishing and establishing and maintaining a communal nature-conservation side are all ways of making the future. Ways of envisioning, of planning and of making the future critically depend on culturally defined and socially institutionalized temporal frames of reference. To better understand current socio-economical transformations on the African continent linked to the conservation of nature, I seek to make temporal frames inherent for instance in cultural practices, material gadgets and in routines explicit as visions of the future that otherwise remain implicit.